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Wow, where did the year go? It’s hard to believe we are coming to that time of year when the Singapore Writers Festival comes a cracking. I have two events this year, the details of which are listed below:

Yuval Noah Harari theorized that religion is humankind’s greatest invention. But do spiritual belief and faith still have a place in this age of science and technology? This conversation considers the relationships between science fiction, science, faith, hyperreality, and the future of humankind.

When writing about intergalactic empires and space adventures, to what extent do writers need to be mindful of scientific plausibility? Should they abide by space travel rules at all? Three writers discuss why they’ve chosen to set their stories in space and how they’ve imagined an entire interstellar universe.

I will be attending Milford Writer’s Conference this September at Dyffryn Nantlle (the Nantlle Valley) in the Snowdonia National Park, Wales. Oddly enough this will be the first professional writing workshop that I will attend (not having the confidence and the wherewithal to do so previously).

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The Milford Writers’ Conference, is an annual science fiction writer’s event founded by SF Grand Master Damon Knight (among others) in the mid-1950s. It’s both a residential workshop and a writers’ conference where published SF writers convene over the course of a week to both intensively critique stories and novels excerpts, as well as to workshop ideas on all aspects of SF writing. Past participants have included James Blish, Samuel Delaney, Harlan Ellison, Carol Emshwiller, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, Judith Merril, Robert Silverberg, Bruce Sterling, Kurt Vonnegut, Gene Wolfe and many other familiar names.

This has been one of the busiest years for me ever — now that I am responsible for the entire APAC and the Middle East. My work in the Mobile Identity space has been extremely challenging and tech-heavy, so one of the things I am most looking forward to is the chance to be unplugged — at least for a week. The workshop is being held inside a national park where there is limited Wi-Fi availability and absolutely no mobile phone reception. If I need to call work, I have to invest coinage to use a pay phone (imagine that).

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Snowdonia is the home of Arthurian legend and the Nantlle valley is the site of one of the tales in the Mabinogi, one of the oldest collections of British Celtic myths. I really hope this inspires me to complete the novel that I have long been working on seemingly forever.

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Interestingly. I will be the first writer from Singapore to be part of Milford. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz was the first Filipino to attend and I am proud to follow in her pioneering footsteps. Am a bit nervous, but definitely looking forward to being there.

I was surprised to learn that my book, The Infinite Library And Other Stories, was recently featured by the Centre for Strategic Futures on their Recommended Reads site on LinkedIn. The CSF is a think tank under the office of the Prime Minister of Singapore. Thank you so much to Ms Liana Tang, Deputy Head of CSF for her wonderful review!

As part of the sixth installment of Read! Fest by the National Library Board in Singapore, Senior Artificial Intelligence Researcher Dr Ken Kahn from the University of Oxford and I will be giving a talk about how Science Fiction can predict and inspire real-world discoveries and inventions (or vice-versa).

Here’s the Blurb from Read! Fest 2019:

Programme Synopsis
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke describes a portable flat screen news pad which forecast the iPads that we love and use today years before they were even created. Unconstrained by scientific impossibilities and spurred on by unbounded imagination, science fiction has successfully predicted technologies ranging from earphones and radios to medical drugs like anti-depressants. It continues to be a useful tool to conjure new technologies and explore their impact on society. Join Singaporean based writer Victor Ocampo and Senior Researcher, Dr Ken Kahn from the University of Oxford as they share their perspectives on the genre and their love for sci-fic and ultimately attempt to answer the question: Does Science Fiction Predict or Inspire?

About the Speakers
Dr Ken Kahn’s interest in science fiction from early childhood eventually led him to join the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab which awarded him a doctorate in 1979. As part of his master’s thesis he built a system that could understand Robert Heinlein’s story All You Zombies – a very convoluted time travel story. He now does research at the University of Oxford and teaches at Yale-NUS.

Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is a Singapore-based Filipino writer. He is the author of The Infinite Library and Other Stories (Math Paper Press, 2017) and Here be Dragons (Canvas Press, 2015), which won the Romeo Forbes Children’s Story Award in 2012. His writing has appeared in many publications including Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Philippines Graphic, Science Fiction World and QLRS, as well as anthologies like Best New Singapore Short Stories and Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction.

This year Read! Fest is anchored on the theme of Voyage. Book a trip with us and discover alternative forms of reading at Read! Fest 2019 programmes as we journey through space and time, only from 22 June – 28 July.

When and Where: Saturday 20 July 2019, 11:00 to 11:30 AM at the Imagination and Possibility Room, The National Library, 1000 Victoria Street, Singapore.

Fan art is always a wonderful thing. I got a major case of the feels after finding out recently that a Surabaya, Indonesia artist, Aldrich Hezekiah (known on Twitter and DeviantArt as KiaBUGboy) had created a comic book based on my story Blessed Are The Hungry (Apex Magazine Vol. 62, editor Sigrid Ellis). Aldrich is currently pursuing his studies in Digital Art in Singapore. You can see more of his work here.

Thank you so much!

It’s interesting how this story is virtually unknown and unread in the Philippines — despite having been translated into Chinese (by one of the translators for Game of Thrones no less) and read by over a million people. It had received great reviews from places as far away as the US, the UK and New Zealand, and has even been used as resource material by a both a High School literature class in Las Vegas, as well as one of the Clarion workshops.

I really need to get my collection published in Manila. But now that VisPrint is gone, does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you to the INK: Literary Collective of the #Yale-NUS college for inviting me to lead a generative Speculative Fiction workshop last Sunday as part of the Words In Progress: Yale-NUS Manuscript Intensive Weekend 2019. I hope I was able to give all the participants a different perspective on fantastical fiction and how they could use its tropes and techniques to put a new spin on their writing.

The day before that (Saturday) I had joined Singapore Literature Prize Winner Melissa De Silva in doing a critical review of two of the manuscripts submitted to INK. All in all it was a weekend well spent at the Yale-NUS Writing Centre.

I had great fun last Saturday (2 March) sharing my writing process with class of mostly Junior College and University kids. This lecture/workshop was part of the Singapore Book Council’s Open: Singapore Young Writers Lab series, a year-round program consisting of talks, workshops and mentorships for writers between the ages of 13 and 25. .

The three-hour session was divided into a lecture portion on the history, importance and types of Science Fiction, an interactive session on story-writing basics, then a workshop where the students would produce a one to three sentence story or word-clump*. The best two of which would win prizes. Interestingly the oldest and the youngest of the participants won first and second prize respectively.

Here was my course outline:

1.What is Science Fiction?

2. Developing Science Fiction Ideas

3.Building A Story Structure –

Basic Plot Cheat Sheet

Character Building

Setting, Viewpoints and Tense

Creating a Vibrant Narrative Voice

4. Getting Published

Marketing your work

Can you make money from SF Fiction?

5. Workshop Proper: Writing, Editing and Sharing (One Hour)

6. Q&A

Thank you again to the Singapore Book Council (SBC) for inviting me. Please check out the rest of the Open: Singapore Young Writers Lab. Thank you also to everyone who took time from their Saturday afternoon to participate in our very lively session.

*n.b. This workshop was meant to introduce my writing process for Science Fiction rather than to produce a full short story. The goal was to teach participants how to develop an idea into a concrete flash fiction piece.